Nowadays, the idea of EoD (Ease of Development) is spreading in Java (the registered trademark of Sun Microsystems incorporated: hereinafter, the same meaning shall apply). EoD is a specification policy of Java that everyone can perform Java development easily. In particular, specifications about implementation of an application in which a business logic such as EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) and Servlet is included have begun to be provided. By utilizing annotation information, these specifications make developer's work simplified and light-weighted as far as possible.
Here, as a technology related to a scheme to utilize annotation information, there are a method disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2008-210059 (patent document 1) and a method disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 1997-222974 (patent document 2), for example.
According to the method disclosed in patent document 1, an analyzer has a structure which extracts annotation information embedded in a method definition section in a source code, and converts the annotation information into a form that can be evaluated on a debugger. By a developer defining a specific conditional expression as annotation information, the analyzer can make debugging work when abnormality happening in a program efficient.
Also, according to a method disclosed in patent document 2, an analyzer has a structure which extracts annotation information embedded in HTML (Hyper Text Makeup Language), and a display apparatus has a structure which customizes information to be displayed on a screen based on the information. This annotation information is described as a comment in HTML. The display apparatus can analyze this annotation information. By this structure, the display apparatus keeps backward compatibility about display of HTML data in which annotation information is embedded. The display apparatus can customize display based on the annotation information.